Coin operated devices are well known in the art. In addition to the ubiquitous vending machines that are used to dispense various items of merchandise, there are, for example, coin operated car washes, laundramats, games, parking meters, and slot machines. Such mechanisms provide a number of important advantages, both to the provider of the goods and services and to the individuals who use them. For example, the mechanisms can be placed in an unsupervised setting, such that the owner/operator can provide needed goods or services without incurring attendant labor costs and inconveniences, and the user can obtain needed goods or services at a reasonable price in a convenient manner.
As an alternative to the use of coins minted by governmental bodies as legal tender, tokens are often used as a substitute media of value exchange for goods and services marketed by a particular organization. Tokens provide important advantages in this context. For example, an unsupervised coin box full of tokens may present little attraction to a thief, if the tokens have limited (or no) exchange value outside of a particular vending environment. Also, tokens are often viewed by their users as "non-money", and are frequently spent more freely by the user because of this. Further, tokens are often kept as souvenirs by users without redemption to the obvious benefit of the owner/operator. Tokens also allow an owner/operator to alter the selling price of the token without requiring commensurate changes to the token operated machinery or system.
Despite these numerous advantages, however, token usage has met with limited acceptance, primarily for one reason; tokens sponsored by various organizations (and perhaps offered at differing prices) cannot always be reliably distinguished from one another by existing coin operated devices. This problem becomes particularly troublesome when two (or more) organizations offer similar tokens at different prices in geographic nexus to one another. The organization offering the higher priced tokens will often find the lesser priced tokens in their coin boxes, creating an obvious loss of revenue.
The above noted problem exists primarily because only a few diameters for tokens are, as a practical matter, available for use. For example, the U.S. Treasury Department prohibits tokens that are too close in physical size to official coinage. Further, tokens larger than a quarter or smaller than a dime find little long term acceptance with either owner/operators or users. Also, manufacturing and testing tolerances require a 0.020 to 0.030 inch diameter window. As a net result, there are only about six available useful token diameters. Coding tokens solely on the basis of diameter therefore has not provided significant competition as an alternative to legal tender coinage, particularly in metropolitan areas.
Alternative methods of encoding tokens have been suggested. One system, marketed under the name Q-bit, uses a plurality of parallel grooves on the face of the token to create a code. Different codes can be created by including (or not including) such grooves in predetermined positions on the token. Because of physical tolerances and redundancies required by this approach, there are only about 32 unique codes that can be provided. Also, this approach requires expensive and often times difficult retrofitting of existing equipment, and further requires that each possible acceptable token have associated therewith a particular validation screen that must mate physically with the token being tested, such that certain machines must have certain specific screens to accomodate certain specific tokens.
Another suggested encoding method for use with tokens, used primarily by the gaming industry, provides for the placement of a bar code on the edge of the token. This bar code, similar to the UPC bar code found on most consumer products, serves to uniquely identify the token sponsor and the denomination of the token itself. Although such a coding approach allows a significantly increased number of unique codes, this approach also requires the use of laser bar code scanners, the latter being significantly more expensive than typical coin acceptor mechanisms. Although the complexity, and hence cost, of such a scanner can be reduced by using tokens having the bar code printed on a face thereof (as versus the side), such tokens are also considerably more easy to counterfeit by simple ink stamping techniques.
A need therefore exists for a token that offers an increased number of available codes, and that can be manufactured in a relatively low cost manner. Preferably, such a token should be usable with a reasonably priced and readily retrofitable token validating device.